Thank you for all the answers. Caroline said "if you client thinks that 'too lazy to type' is a description of your users then maybe a bit of audience research would be a good idea." Well, when is that a bad idea? :)
Katie said "normally I tab through forms, and invariably the drop down menu is skipped" I'm not sure I follow... cause you CAN tab to a drop down. In IE6/Win... so in every browser :) Oh, and IE6 actually highlights it. Random form to test in: http://www.earthhour.org/sign-up And i totally love this you wrote: "And the next person who puts a drop down menu with all the nations or all the states in front of me will probably hear the explosion". Unfortunately, clients hate explosions. I think. Mila, thank you for the story, it's fun-tastic. "They said they normally prefer to tab to each field and type in the data, but for pull down fields they HAD to use the mouse to select the desired value since the field was filled in with something already so they couldn't type in it." Amanda, thanks for the thourough answer. My problem is, I kinda do need a country list :) And it needs to be in a really small space. So, I would dare to extend the question: what's best practice in dropdowns with lots of items? Other that not having lots of items, that is. I mean, we could ressurrect Hitler and wipe out a few dozen countries, but that sounds rather rash, don't you think? Probably dividing the options in categories, and doing a widget like the one on deviantart.com (top left, labeled Categories), would be a nice approach. Other ideas? ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
